The Night Owl’s Call Isn’t a Death Omen. It’s a Mouse Warning.

On a winter night in the north, wind slipped through the crack in the window. From the old locust tree behind the house came a call. Short. Hoarse. Quivering. Like someone laughing, or someone crying. The old man turned over and said, “The night owl is calling. Bad sign.” The next day someone in the village died, and the saying was confirmed.

The owl had no time to announce a death. It was digesting a field mouse.

1. How Many Mice Does It Catch in a Night?

Owls are birds in the order Strigiformes. China has dozens of species: the Eurasian eagle-owl, long-eared owl, short-eared owl, barn owl, little owl, and others. Their eyes are large, but their eyeballs cannot rotate, so their necks can turn more than 200 degrees. Their facial discs work like radar. The edges of their feathers are soft, so they fly silently. These parts evolved to catch mice in the dark. They did not evolve to scare people.

A barn owl during the brooding season delivers three to five mice to the nest each day. A pair of barn owls raising chicks can clear more than a thousand rodents in one summer. The Eurasian eagle-owl is larger. It can catch rabbits, and it also catches mice. Long-eared owls concentrate on catching mice in their wintering grounds, flying back and forth more than a dozen times a night.

For farmers, this is a good thing. Fewer mice, a steadier granary, less disease. But when the owl calls at night, people cannot see it catch mice. They only hear it call. The sound is shrill. It flies silently. Its eyes shine in the moonlight. So people pasted their fear onto it.

2. What the Ancients Feared Was Mice

The ancients had no ecology, but they had pattern recognition. They noticed that if the owl called every night, soon someone in the village would die. So they concluded: the owl calls, someone dies.

The chain might be this: the village had more grain, more garbage, more rot, so there were more mice. More mice, and snakes came. More snakes, and badgers, wild boars, wolves, and leopards might come too. People living in a broken hut in wild hills and empty fields could be bitten by a snake, gored by a wild boar, carried off by a wolf, or catch plague. All were high-probability events. The owl just came to eat mice. It called because it had settled here. It settled here because there was food.

The sanitation of an ancient village is hard to imagine today. Garbage dumped behind the house. Dung heaps in the corner. Dead cats and dogs thrown into ditches. Mice nested in grain bins and under beds. Snakes crawled in along the wall base. The owl stood in the tree and saw a buffet table.

So when the old man said, “The night owl is calling. Bad sign,” there was survival wisdom behind it: this place had many mice and snakes, and people died easily. But they mistook the alarm for the arsonist.

3. Crows: Farmers Find Them Ominous, Hunters Find Them Lucky

Crows, like owls, have been made cultural scapegoats.

Crows eat carrion. They move in flocks, eating animal corpses, but also insects, grain, fruit, and garbage. In the wilderness, if a flock of crows circles in the sky, there is likely a corpse below. The corpse might be an animal that died of old age, or one that was killed by a predator. Who killed it? An apex predator may have arrived. If you live alone in the wilderness, are you afraid?

Farming peoples were afraid. Farmers guarded fields, villages, and granaries. What they feared most was death, plague, beasts of prey, and war. Crows often appeared in connection with carrion, corpses, garbage, and battlefields. Black, harsh-voiced, and flocking, they were naturally painted with gloom in culture.

But the Manchus and other hunting-fishing peoples regarded crows as lucky birds. Hunters need intelligence. Crows can indicate animal carcasses, prey remains, and predator activity. Circling in the sky, they mark a red circle for the hunter: over there is something big. Maybe a bear. Maybe a tiger. Maybe a wolf. Maybe a herd of deer. If you have enough men, go take a look; you might get a hide. If not, turn and go elsewhere to dig ginseng. Do not go near.

At the Liaodong horse markets in the Ming dynasty, animal hides were important goods. Records mention prices for tiger, leopard, and bear skins, but if those numbers are taken directly as final sale prices, they are implausibly low. They more likely involved market levies, tax silver, or official price discounts. Manchu tribes fought and died for imperial credentials. Whoever had more credentials was king. For hunters, hides were a necessary product of labor. If crows could indicate the presence of large predators, they could be seen as lucky birds.

The same crow: a farmer sees it and feels gloom; a hunter sees it and feels an auspicious sign. The crow did not change. People’s livelihoods changed.

4. Why Are Magpies Favored?

Magpies and crows both belong to the corvid family. Magpies eat insects, especially pests such as locusts and scarab beetles. They often live near farmland, orchards, and residential areas. Their calls are crisp, their black-and-white plumage distinct. When one lands on a plum branch by the gate, it is “joy on the eyebrows.”

But magpies also eat grain, fruit, the eggs and chicks of small birds. For farmers, they have benefits and harms. Yet in Chinese culture, the magpie was shaped into a bird of good news, the crow into a bird of death. One calls at the gate, the other calls beside a corpse. People always take the last image they saw as the cause.

5. Owls in Modern Residential Compounds

If you hear an owl call in modern times, inspect the environment.

An owl appearing in a residential compound may mean there are quite a few rodents nearby, or it may mean urban ecology is recovering. It may live in an old tree hollow, beside an air-conditioner unit, or in a willow by the river. It calls to declare territory in the breeding season, to court, or because a chick is begging for food.

Do not poison rats. Rat poison travels up the food chain and kills owls, snakes, and birds of prey. An owl that eats a poisoned mouse is poisoned in turn, dies in a tree hollow, and no one knows. Do not raid nests. Do not drive them away. Do not harm them. Almost all owl species found in China are protected by national law, usually as Class II protected wild animals. Harming them is illegal.

If an owl calls every night, first check for garbage, mouse holes, snake tracks, stagnant water, and rotting matter. It is announcing dinner. The Grim Reaper is not involved. It is auditing a rodent problem.

6. Finally

A man heard an owl call. He did not burn incense, and he did not spit. He walked to the backyard and saw the trash can uncovered, rats rummaging. He put the lid on and weighted it with a brick. The owl called once and flew away.

He went back inside, closed the window, and went back to sleep.